I think a second policy on Vassals is very much a higher priority than a second Defense policy or a fourth Infrastructure Policy.
I absolutely love Infrastructure Policies, but I think 3 of them is already a good place to be. As it is, our passive policy can do a medium sized (6 progress) project in a single turn, or finish a large (9 progress) project if we prompt them with the first action. More build capacity is always better, but I can't really call it urgent at this point.
As for Defensive policies, those do speed up the rate at which we plop down walls but I'm pretty sure that our old borders are already walled off, and our new borders are all in peripheral states and thus not subject to our actions. So basically we would be building more walls in the core, which I find to be of limited importance.
In contrast, Vassal Support is looking to be the crisis of our age. If we collapse or suffer a major setback in the next ten or so turns, I expect it it to be either directly caused or at least precipitated by our peripheral states having different culture and/or lowered loyalty to us.
In light of this, I think that 2x Vassal Support is our best bet at combating the critical issues that we will be facing. I say this not merely because we just absorbed two vassals that demand intervention NOW, but because we've seem Subordinate issues growing over a long time now.
Counterpoint: Defense Policy has a terminus, which we can approach more quickly the more Defense policies are active. Once it reaches 100%, Defense passive policy would become obsolete, which allows us to pursue other policies without worrying too much about building new walls to go with settlements because walls would be integral to settlements.
And Infrastructure policies govern the growth rate of cities. The more Infrastructure policies, the more Policies we'd get sooner. This means the mid to long term optima for policies would always be to have a large proportion of Infrastructure policies.
Didn't we pretty much know it was inevitable? And this strikes a good balance; parents have the incentive to think long term and preserve/upgrade their land for their children. But massively incompetant children will end up disinherited.
Which is to say the parents have a really big incentive not to invest so much into the land beyond what is needed to earn/retain it, but to invest into their CHILDREN to ensure that they can continue to keep the land.
Ehhh if it establishes a new governor yes but if a governor already existed and all they can see is him getting a fancy house, no
People have said this for the Palace, but that is not true when we built it.
People don't see the governor or king getting a 'fancy house', because that's not what it's for. It's an administrative structure to house a small army of clerks to Efficiently administrate their domain.
In other words, a job tool.
how are we defining agricultural yield? Iirc pbluekan talked about how we can practice more directed breeding to get better cultivars, splicing, and crop rotation. We don't have those yet. Vineyards is quite likely to get directed breeding and possibly splicing/grafting (some grape varietals have better roots but worse grapes). Hemp, maybe, would result in crop rotation.
Other options are a more formal knowledge of plants that improve yields when grown together if we don't have that yet, better threshing tools, better seeding tools.
Agricultural volume of edible produce per acre is the primary factor here, because the discussion was about agriculturally backed population growth.
Quality of course is nice, but not really hugely relevant to the ability to sustain larger populations.
All of these are direct yield increases. Things like "industry" I.e. The water wheel increase agricultural yield by decreasing wastage and overhead. Same opportunities for wax, including bug repelling herbs, importing cats.
Yes, we have ox driven mills but you have to feed and tend to the on whereas the mills need repair and then only occasionally. Less work. More food leftover. Possibly more flour that can be produced at a time.
It cuts the needed manpower yes, but again is completely irrelevant to the discussion, which was about how people living elsewhere will develop the same technologies to outcompete us on food production, leading to beating us on population.
The discussion demonstrated that such a series of events was unlikely, our particular set of innovations was extremely environment induced local optima and difficult to replicate the same scenario, which required isolationist hill people deciding to farm super good instead of mine super good, who then abruptly became no longer isolationist.
Our priests maybe haven't involved themselves in politics, but we have examples of that being an issue in the Xoh. Furthermore, social issues alone is enough to make traders wary. The unifying potential over the urban poor is an issue too, one we've had some experience with when dealing with the Txolla. There's also the whole priests glaring at traders thing. Having a large temple close by means they can glare harder.
That's a valid concern, though considering Pilgrimage is a Trade Dominance in itself and benefits from Guild Mercantile...whether they're in favor of more of it should be fairly clear.
